Company Overview

The Oregon Food Bank (OFB), a nonprofit, charitable organization, is the heart of a statewide network of more than 894 hunger-relief agencies serving Oregon and Clark County, Washington. The OFB recovers and distributes food from farmers, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, individuals and government sources. The OFB directly operates the three regional food banks serving the Portland metro area and southeast Oregon where it distributes food weekly to more than 300 food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and other programs helping low-income individuals in Clackamas, Clark, Multnomah, Washington, Malheur and Harney counties.

The OFB also works to eliminate the root causes of hunger through advocacy, nutrition education, learning gardens and public education.

Opportunity

The OFB has an extensive donor program in place, ranging from large corporate donations and planned giving to small individual contributions of money and food. In the interest of managing their donor program more efficiently, the OFB wanted to develop a system which would both consolidate and manage a donor’s contributions over time and also present a unified view of each contributor. To begin the process, the OFB hired Robert Foley, now part of the Swipht team, as an independent contractor to examine their then current practices and subsequent recommendations.

Solution

Some of Swipht’s early experience in web development was gained when Swipht’s team members were working as independent contractors. A particularly notable assignment was the OFB project that Robert Foley worked on as a business analyst. The solution involved auditing over 23 separate data sources and systems used by the organizations at multiple locations throughout Oregon. Interviews were conducted with department managers, personnel, and volunteers on each department's business processes, rules, and system usage. Existing custom-built and vendor systems used within and between each department were audited. The solution required over two months of system and database analysis to define correlations between the 23 separate data schemas and the desired goal of one unified donor view.

After conducting interviews and auditing multiple systems and databases, three development strategies each with varying levels of complexity and costs were recommended. To begin with, all but two of the larger vendor driven products would be consolidated into a centralized MS SQL server system. In addition, an ASP.NET client would be designed for all department personnel to use for donation entry, event management, and statistical analysis and reporting. Finally, a Microsoft BizTalk service would be used to convert data between the three systems and Microsoft Reporting Services would be used to design and host all analytical needs for each department and the executive management.

Results

The OFB was greatly pleased with Robert Foley’s work. Robert’s functional design, information design, and database schema for the new consolidated system earned the OFB’s comment that his documentation was the most thorough and detailed system design they had ever seen. Although there were some daunting tasks to accomplish and many areas of the systems were quite abstract, in the end a system design emerged that not only provided a foundation for the customer's business rules but also provided a modular, configurable system that could be retooled for other organizations.